Here is a brain dump about XCF and state persistence. It is just foodfor thought and does not require immediate action for 2.6, exceptmaybe for the handling of the flag GIMP_PARASITE_PERSISTENT: Some time ago, Peter mentioned that he would like the XCF file formatto save all state associated with the image, so that you can reloadthe file later and continue exactly where you left off. This impliesthat each XCF file would have to save the state of the image as wellas a bit of the GIMP state but we still have to discuss how far wewant to go with that. For example: do we save the state of all toolsin each XCF file? Do we save the current settings for all plug-ins?Do we allow the user to remove that information before sharing the XCFfile with other users? But besides the state of the environment (GIMP tools and plug-ins), weshould also ensure that the state of the image is correctly saved.With the current GIMP, this is not perfect because some informationabout the image exists only in internal (temporary) data structuresand some other data is stored in image or layer parasites that are notpersistent so these things are not saved in the XCF file. For example, if you save a work-in-progress as XCF and come back to itlater, then you may have lost the original file name, you may not beable to recompose layers that were decomposed from another layer andyou may get different settings if you save the image as TIFF or JPEG(because the parasites "decompose-data" or "tiff-save-options" are notpersistent). If we want to solve some of these problems in 2.6 or later releases,then a first step would be to make all parasites persistent (as ifGIMP_PARASITE_PERSISTENT was always included in the flags). We willalso have to ensure that all binary parasites handle byte orderingcorrectly because any XCF file could be loaded later on a differentplatform. Would there be any objection to making all parasitespersistent by default? -Raphaël_______________________________________________Gimp-developer mailing listGimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
